The week started with a visit to the company doctor. After I had spent a good twenty minutes scurrying through various medical websites looking specifically for 'symptoms of heart attack'. Now it's not funny how different websites have so many different symptoms listed down. It's like you go to one and they say this, this and this. You're happy - great so I have nothing to worry about. But then you decide to get a second opinion, which on the internet can only serve to heighten your confusion, if not your fears. Because the second website will have this, this, this and THIS! Bludy hell! Start worrying again. Shit, I'm gonna kick the bucket if I don't rush to a doctor NOW! So that's what I did. Dropped everything and rushed, like my damn life depended on it. And who knows, maybe it did.

Stupid lady doc doesn't seem to take me seriously. I've been having this pain in the left side of my chest since last evening, and I'm not sure what it might be. Do you have indigestion, she asks coolly. Arre indigestion ko maaro goli, my heart may be on it's last few beats here, do something dammit!! No no, I think it might be my heart, I say nervously. She starts laughing. And I mean really a hearty laugh. Which is when I begin suspecting she might be one of them quack doctors from Jalgaon. After all why would any medical professional worth his/her salt sit in a room in an IT company handing out Disprins and Crocin to people ... Nope, doesn't make sense.

Anyway she decides, and I can sense the disinterest, to examine me more thoroughly. Or so I thought. Because all she does is make me lie down and wraps that electronic pressure gauge around my arm. Which is quite a cool little device compared to the old hand-held one that went puchh-puchh-puchh-puchh and felt like it would blow up anytime. Pressure is normal, she says, nothing to worry. Hey hang on - what about pulse, breathing etc. Don't you need to check that? No, not required. OMG she is a quack from bludy Jalgaon!

My mind is racing. Maybe I should take the next transport out and rush to family doctor. But I should call home first. Damn, they'll just start on again about the exercise and the diet and the drinking. No, I'll just rush to the doc - a real doc, not like this quack-ass female.

She gives me two green gel capsules. To thin the blood, or clear the arteries, I'm not sure. So I ask her. Pudin Hara, she replies, cool as a cucumber again. Take two now, two later. But you only gave me two! The rest you'll have to buy, she says bluntly.

I have a good mind to send an email to Chairman & MD. Bastard if you can't give your employees one full strip of Pudin Hara, you you... YOU SUCK!

So that's what it turned out to be. Pressure around the chest region as a result of indigestion (she didn't say that, my own inference). Which, now that I think about it explains why she was so cool. In a company where the gastronomical delights served up in the canteen everyday could easily be converted into low-grade biological weapons, I'm sure every second person is a sufferer.

***

Two weeks and I'll be in the US of A. I really do need to start exercising again. I hate this lifestyle I have now. Work, eat, drink, sleep, shit and blog. Nope, not good. On the diet front I've been eating salads all week, so that's a start. Which is not so bad you know. In fact I quite like it.

I was watching Obama speak at the Democratic Convention last night. Dude is quite an orator, isn't he. And whoever writes his speeches is doing a damn good job.

It's all in the marketing ultimately. Which is something I was thinking about yesterday. So much of life's successes depends on how we market ourselves -- the jobs we land, the women we sleep with. Actually it's just those two.

Natalie and the Chicks. Landslide.